Bubble City: Preface

November is National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo. The idea, as far
as I can discern, is that more people ought to be writing novels. But
whether this is for us or them is not clear.

Novels have an odd place in our culture. They can be capital-L
Literature, as in the Great American Novel. Or they can be
entertainment, as in romance or mystery novels. Or, and perhaps best,
they can capture the essence of a place or time by using it as the
backdrop for a story.

In this way, a novel is disguised memoir, as anyone who is friends with
a novelist can readily discern. And, like a memoir, writing them can be
therapeutic, exorcising a writer’s demons, while hopefully being more
entertaining.

Over the next month I will be serializing a novel, Bubble City, in this space, one chapter every day. NaNoWriMo requires novels be at least 50,000 words in length and thirty days hath November, so I’ll aim for 1666 words a day, although if I get lazy I may make some days shorter if I go over on previous ones.

There are lots of reasons not to read
it: I have no experience writing long-form fiction, I will be writing
this live and thus bound to errors I make in previous chapters, you will
undoubtedly be negatively portrayed in it, I have not really planned
this out, and I have no great things to say. Each post’s title will
begin with “Bubble City:” so you can easily ignore them.

That said, if you want to read a yarn about the denizens of San
Francisco startups, the power they presume to have over the world, and
what happens when programmers get in over their heads, stay tuned.